Roger Martin du Gard

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The French author Roger Martin du Gard (1881-1958) portrayed the conflicts in man's consciousness between religion and science against the backdrop of the social upheaval in France during the early 20th century.

Roger Martin du Gard was born at Neuilly-sur-Seine on March 23, 1881, the son of a lawyer. In 1892 he began studying at the Catholic École Fénelon and met a leader of the Catholic modernist movement, the Abbé Marcel Hébert; their friendship lasted until the priest's death in 1916. After studying literature at the Sorbonne, Martin du Gard enrolled in the École des Chartes to prepare himself as an archivist and paleographer. In 1905 he successfully defended his thesis Les Ruines de l'Abbaye de Jumièges and was awarded the diplôme d'archivistepaléographe.

In 1906 Martin du Gard married Hélène Foucault. During their honeymoon in North Africa he drew up a plan of his first novel, Une Vie de Saint. Inspired by the Abbé Hébert, the novel was to be a detailed biography of a country priest. Realizing that his ambitions outdistanced his capacities, he abandoned his work in 1907. But his experience provided him with familiar material for his next venture. He decided, he says in his memoirs, to tell the life of a young and presumptuous writer, André Mazerelles, lacking talent but not illusions concerning his ability. In Devenir! (1908) he relied upon the traditional third-person narrative, which allowed ironic observation on character and situation.

Martin du Gard immediately began work on a long novel (Marise) based on the life of a woman and developing the themes of solitude and death. Again he realized that his experience was too limited; he abandoned Marise, publishing only a fragment as a short story, L'Une de nous (1910). That same year he began work on "a long masculine monograph, the destiny of a man and the history of a conscience." This novel, Jean Barois (1913), traces the evolution of a scientist and journalist from the religion of his youth to his espousal of science as the only source of truth and certainty and, finally, to his return in weakness and old age to Catholicism. The novel strives to be a symbolic concentration not only of a man's life but also of a spiritual crisis in pre-World War I France.

After World War I Martin du Gard began work on his long saga novel, Les Thibault. Six volumes were published: Le Cahier gris and Le Pénitencier (1922), La Belle saison (1923), La Consultation (1928), La Sorellina (1928), and La Mort du Père (1929); they represented only a third of the projected work. Realizing that his original plan for Les Thibault was much too cumbersome, he decided to abandon it and graft a new conclusion onto the old stock. L'Été1914, in three volumes, appeared in 1936, and Épilogue in 1940.

In Les Thibault, Jacques Thibault, a revolutionary, and his brother Antoine, a doctor and man of science, attempt to fashion a meaningful life in a world without God. Into this double pattern, Martin du Gard introduces a third alternative, that of art and passion, in the person of the Thibault's childhood friend Daniel de Fontanin. Neither alternative can permanently fill the void left by God's absence, but only Antoine's adaptability and moderation enable him emotionally to survive the disaster of World War I. Although he, too, is a victim of the war, his diary, kept as he approaches death, is intended as a model of will and reason for the edification of his nephew Jean-Paul.

In 1937 Martin du Gard won the Nobel Prize for literature. After 1940 he published little. He died on Aug 22, 1958, at Bellême.

Further Reading

There are several useful biographies and critical studies of Martin du Gard: Robert Gibson, Roger Martin du Gard (1961); Denis Boak, Roger Martin du Gard (1963); and David L. Schalk, Roger Martin du Gard: the Novelist and History (1967). Recommended for general historical background are Guy Chapman, The Dreyfus Case: A Reassessment (1955); Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France (2 vols., 1957-1961; rev. ed., 3 vols., 1962-1965); and Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890-1914 (1966).

Martin Du Gard, Roger (1881-1958). French novelist, playwright, and diarist, winner of a Nobel Prize in 1937. Much of Martin du Gard's work is a monument to mimesis, for he aimed for absolute transparency of presentation. It is none the less arguable that his lifetime's labours to achieve that goal in his multi-volume Les Thibault (1922-40) and the unfinished Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort (1983) diminished the artful narrative talents evident in Jean Barois (1913) and in shorter works such as Confidence africaine (1931), the delightfully bleak Vieille France (1933), or even his subtly robust peasant farce Le Testament du père Leleu (1914). Jean Barois, a vigorous quasi-cinematographic analysis of Third Republic mentalities, earned him entry to the NRF group. The novels of Tolstoy and Dickens are the models for his major work, Les Thibault, which presents the lives of two middle-class brothers from adolescence onwards and celebrates youthful revolt, secular integrity, medicine, socialism, and sexuality, with death as the axis of the human condition. A similar tragic humanism characterizes the posthumously published Maumort. Martin du Gard was a man of judgement and counsel; his Correspondance générale (7 vols. to date) is important, notably his exchange of letters with Gide (2 vols., 1968). His Journal (vol. I, 1992) erodes the intriguing discretion in which he veiled his personal life.

[David Steel]

Roger Martin du Gard
Born	23 March 1881(1881-03-23) Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine
Died	22 August 1958 (aged 77) Sérigny, Orne
Nationality	French
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1937
Influences Leo Tolstoy

Roger Martin du Gard (23 March 1881 - 22 August 1958) was a French author and winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize for Literature. Trained as a paleographer and archivist, Martin du Gard brought to his works a spirit of objectivity and a scrupulous regard for details. For his concern with documentation and with the relationship of social reality to individual development, he has been linked with the realist and naturalist traditions of the 19th century. His major work was Les Thibault, a roman fleuve about the Thibault family, originally published as a series of eight novels. The story follows the fortunes of the two Thibault brothers, Antoine and Jacques, from their prosperous bourgeois upbringing, through the First World War, to their deaths. He also wrote a novel, Jean Barois, set in the historical context of the Dreyfus Affair.

During the Second World war he resided in Nice, where he prepared a novel, which remained unfinished (Souvenirs du lieutenant-colonel de Maumort); an English-language translation of this unfinished novel was published in 2000.

Roger Martin du Gard died in 1958 and was buried in the Cimiez Monastery Cemetery in Cimiez, a suburb of the city of Nice, France.

External links

• Roger Martin du Gard, 1937 Nobel Laureate for Literature
• About Roger Martin du Gard
• Roger Martin du Gard

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